"You'll find many on the forum that use a combination of TM and SD! or CCC."

At this point, I think this is going to be my strategy moving forward.

I am thinking of taking a portion of one or both of the external hard drives I have and partitioning them to create a separate backup (using TM) for all of my Mac's system files and personal files that I currently am using (about 160GB). Then, using the rest of the space on the drives for archiving precious photos, videos, docs, etc. that I just simply want to keep.